What I Did This Week: Goodbye Maureen, a Garlic Barter, and the Cabbage Bikini Threat

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This week was the kind where I played delicately with my delicate poodle in the house and smashed some antique china, and also harvested an 8 poundcabbage. Which I feel like is the full human experience.

Karen Bertelsen in her garden with a just picked 8 pound cabbage.

Let’s begin.

Table of Contents

Maureen Died

Maureen, my Venus Flytrap, died this week.

She'd lived longer than most flytraps, had a good run, and ate more than her fair share of unsuspecting ants. She was moody, complicated, and liked her drinks distilled.

A tiny dried up Venus Flytrap trap against a clay pot.

She is very much dead.

I’d say she died doing what she loved, but really she just slowly gave up over the course of a few weeks until one morning I walked outside and she was a tumbleweed. First she complained because she was too wet, then up and died from being dry.

RIP Maureen. You were carnivorous, temperamental, and impossible. May you rest in my compost pile.

Shattered: One Flow Blue Gravy Boat

Philip and I were playing a very reserved game of chase inside, as one does when it’s August and you’ve hit your outdoor heat limit for the day.

He made a sharp turn. I made a sharper one. The flow blue gravy boat did not survive.

A shattered antique flow blue gravy boat sits on a marble countertop.

It was a really beautiful one too.

On the plus side, the wheat sheaf table it flew off of is still fine, along with a couple of candlesticks I'm quite fond of. Not as fond of as the gravy boat but that's the price I pay for inexplicably having a gravy boat in my living room.

Not so inexplicable actually - it's where I held my peanut butter cups. All wrapped in gold foil no less. I'm very fancy when I'm not hand squishing bugs.

The Garlic Barter Economy Is Thriving

My neighbour came to pick up a piece of misdelivered mail. I left 6 heads of garlic on the porch for them to take too. I didn’t say anything—just quietly placed the garlic there like it was part of some underground vegetable exchange program.

The next day, a jar of sauce appeared on my porch. Then a text. It was a jar of garlic gratitude.

I added ground beef, boiled pasta shells, tore up some basil, and called it dinner.

Pasta shells with meat sauce, mozzarella cheese, and fresh green basil leaves.

Would you like to save this stuff?

We'll email you this post, so you can refer to it later.

Right. And cheese. I added a lot of cheese. I ate it four nights in a row, which is exactly the right number of nights for something that starts with “free sauce from a neighbour.”

🥬 Harvesting, Bit by Bit

The garden harvests are picking up. I've been forced to weed even more so I can actually see if there's watermelon in my watermelon patch.

There are. Three of them. They aren't ready yet.

This week:

8 lbs of potatoes
One 8 lb cabbage (it's a flathead known as Gunma)
Zucchini that look like they were drawn from memory by someone who’s never seen one (They're growing all weird looking because the soil at my community garden is SO dry. Watering every other day no matter how deeply just isn't enough. The soil needs organic matter badly so it can hold more moisture. Sorry, I'll stop with the random gardening tips now.)
A few paste tomatoes that looked like they might be normal, but weren't (I'll reserve my tomato tips for this blossom end rot for another post)

A small wicker basket with various freshly picked vegetables inside including dirt covered potatoes, onions, hot peppers and tomatoes with blossom end rot.

I couldn't wait. I have to tell you a little bit now. I want you to know if that your tomatoes look like this, flat and black on the ends, you have blossom end rot. JUST CUT IT OFF. The rest of the tomato is perfectly fine to eat, don't think of them as a wasted tomato. They're only half of a wasted tomato.

Part of the cabbage is going into winter cabbage soup this weekend, the rest into coleslaw. After that I’ll be left with just enough cabbage leaves to fashion a bikini for sun protection or slaw on the go. I haven’t decided yet.

👉 My Classic Coleslaw Recipe

Flowers & the First Dahlias

The zinnias and dahlias are blooming.

Miss Tegan, one of my semi-cactus dahlias, is just starting to fluff up. I paired her with some Floret zinnias for a small arrangement and stuck it in a dinosaur vase, because I’m an adult and I can.

Miss Tegan dahlias with Floret Original zinnias in a Kikkerland plantosauraus vase.

There’s a lot of flower arranging happening in my kitchen right now. There’s also an absence of available counter space and matching socks.

🦟 Bug Bites and Bad Ideas

I scratched my leg so hard this week it bruised.

I think it was a chigger bite from the garden, but could’ve also been a mosquito with ADD. Either way, I’ve now reached the stage of summer where I consider keeping oven mitts on my hands just to get through the itching.

A foot rests on a countertop showing the bruised calf and bug bites.

Anyway—everything’s fine, and I’ve learned literally nothing from the experience.

That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll try not to break any heirlooms or scratch myself into a new skin tone. I promised the sprinkler fix post this week but you didn't get that. I'm sorry. It will be ready soon.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be outside. Wearing cabbage. Making soup.